


the things you don't want to think about

by provencepuss



Category: Starsky & Hutch
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-02
Updated: 2013-07-02
Packaged: 2017-12-17 11:51:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,731
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/867207
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/provencepuss/pseuds/provencepuss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Zandra’s Court wrote a great short about how Hutch reacted to the events in ‘The Specialist’ and these paragraphs set my Muse running to peek into Starsky’s mind again. Read her story here (http://archiveofourown.org/works/379522)  before reading mine</p>
            </blockquote>





	the things you don't want to think about

_“I just don’t get it, Starsk. How could the government do something like this and get away with it?” Hutch turned towards his partner, his arm pressed against the other man’s. Things were always easier when they were touching, which is why they touched a lot._

_“I think that your mid-west Americanism is just breaking open, buddy. Being in the Army, goin’ to ‘Nam; makes it hard to keep rose colored glasses on about what our country is and isn’t capable of doing. Guys like Drew ain’t new. Maybe how they made him that way was, but that don’t mean our government hasn’t been turning out men like him for generations.”_

_(Naked Personalities by Zandra’s Court.)_

Hutch pretended not to notice the way Starsky caught his lower lip with his teeth; he looked at his partner as he settled back on his chair and busied himself – just a little too intently – with a pile of papers on his own desk before rolling a sheet of paper into his own typewriter and typing fast and accurately with all his fingers.

Hutch studied him surreptitiously; there were times when he wondered if he would ever really know what made his partner tick. Why was it that Starsky preferred to hide his astute mind behind a mix of garrulous good humor; almost naïf credulity and brooding silences? He thought back to their first encounters at the Academy. Starsky was in the group that was almost due to graduate when Hutch started his training. Hutch and his room-mate John Colby, like most of the cadets, were puzzled by the fact that Starsky lived off- campus. There were as many explanations as there were cadets in the Academy; the most popular were stories of an invalid mother, or child, or child or wife. Whatever the reason, Starsky was always there when the others crawled out of their beds to start the day with a run before breakfast; he would shower in the locker room and change into his uniform before joining the cadets in the canteen before classes started. At the end of every day he maybe joined a few of them in the bar down the street from the campus; or he just drove away in his green Camarro with its custom exhaust pipes and extra wide wheels, the engine roaring throatily as he accelerated out of the lot.

Whatever the reason for his not living on campus was all the cadets agreed on one thing; his was going to be one hell of a hard act to follow. He was known to push himself to his limits at all times – even when it came to studying for his exams. He ran hard, fought harder (and dirtier).  When his time came, Hutch would be one of the few cadets to get better marks in the final exams than Starsky did; but he couldn’t hold a candle to the other man’s scores on the practical tests. There was a target sheet hanging in the shooting range, with the initial DMS and a date 4/21/1970. At first glance it seemed that there was only one hole – dead center of the rings – but a second look revealed that the hole was actually almost flower shaped, each petal cut by a separate bullet. And Hutch never thought to ask why.

No more than he thought about the way Starsky rarely missed a shot and was devastated when one of his bullets did human damage. And Hutch had seen that happen; his mind shot back to the expression on Starsky’s face the moment he saw that Lonnie Craig was just a kid; no matter that the kid had been aiming a gun straight at him.

What he did know about Starsky was his weaknesses; physical ones like the injured leg that stopped him in mid chase now and then. On the other hand he only knew that the injury was sustained in Nam; he didn’t even know how or what the damage was.

The conversation that night set Hutch wondering again.

_I look at you. I remember all you’ve gone through. I remember your strength. I remember how we work and the bad guys we bring down. I see myself through your eyes and I can forgive myself a little. Then a little more. And I find my way back by following you_

_(Naked Personalities by Zandra’s Court)_

Back from where?

It took a few beers at Huggy’s for Hutch to finally ask the question.

“Starsky, the other night….”

“Yeah?”

“What did you mean when you said you find your way back?”

Starsky drained his glass in one long. “Drink up and we’ll go get a pizza or something to soak this stuff up.”

“Starsky?”

“Not here, Hutch.”

The look in Starsky’s eye told Hutch not to insist. They finished their beer in silence and Starsky led the way back up to the street where their cars were parked one behind the other.

Hutch didn’t need to ask; he followed the Torino back to Starsky’s house in the canyon.

 

The night was strangely still, the traffic down in the valley was a distant murmur and there were frogs singing in a pond or a ditch somewhere. Seen from the deck the canyons were almost black punctuated here and there with the dims lights from other people’s windows and decks. Starsky brought a bottle of Scotch and two glasses beside the pizza box; Hutch waited in silence for him to speak.

 

“I learned a lot in Nam, Hutch. Things I wish I’d never learned. I learned that I could shoot a man without thinking about what I’d done. The trick was to forget that the enemy was just a load of kids conscripted into doing what I was doing without really knowing why. I had a job and I did it. And I did it well, Hutch; very well. I was good; if my rifle had been a plane I’d have had a long row of….” He frowned, searching for the word. What would they have been? A fighter pilot got a tiny plane on the fuselage every time he brought the enemy down; so what should a sniper have on his gun, stick men, perhaps?

“How many?” Hutch asked quietly.

“I don’t know. We didn’t always go check out the body count. But I do remember the first one; he didn’t look much older than fifteen. I told myself that they all looked young; but I knew that he was probably the same age as my kid brother. I remember feeling sick…I _was_ sick. I came down from my cover and threw up. But the commanding officer told me I’d done a good job, saved the platoon from more losses. So I learned that it was us or them and I was damn sure I wasn’t going home in a box.”

“You were a sniper?”

“For a while, yes. Then they decided that I had other skills. I learned to track, I learned to sneak up behind a man and kill him with a bullet or a knife when he was taking a leak or eating his lousy bowl of rice. And that got me another job.”

He stood up. “And talking of taking a leak….”

 

Hutch stared out into the night; there was something sinister in what Starsky had told him. Sinister because it explained the way Starsky could blank his expression off his face and menace a suspect without the slightest physical threat.  It maybe explained the way Starsky could switch from good cop to bad cop in the wink of an eye; burst into violence and wreck a room in frustration because the bird had flown.

 

The clink of bottle on glass surprised Hutch from his thoughts. He hadn’t heard Starsky come back. Starsky could move like a cat, silent on his sneakered feet. Was that something else he learned in Nam?

“You know the worst thing I learned?”

“No.”

“Yes you do; because you learned it too. You learned it when you got your first citation.”

“My first citation?”

“Yeah…you do remember what it was for, don’t you?”

Hutch stared into his glass. He was still in uniform; a couple of thugs were holding a five-year old kid hostage to cover their exit from a botched hold-up in drug store.  Hutch and his partner were first on the scene. When the man holding the child pushed his knife under the kid’s chin, making her scream and drawing blood, Hutch had taken careful aim and prayed that his hand stayed steady. The citation stated that Hutch had saved a child’s life; but all he could think of was the pool of life-blood on the sidewalk.

“I remember.”

“You killed a man and the system told you that you were a hero. That’s what you learned, Hutch. That’s what I learned. There are times when the ‘powers that be’ don’t give a flying fuck about how you feel or what the damage is. They don’t care about the Eunice Craigs; all they see is the cop who did his job and the criminal who won’t cost the state the dollars that it takes to keep a man in jail, or execute him. They don’t even care how the cop feels”

“But….”

“But you and I _do_ care; we _do_ hurt, we _do_ think about the other lives that have been damaged. And that was the toughest lesson I learned out there in Nam. I learned that I could be a blind machine for them if I had to.”

“And Drew, what was he, another blind machine?”

“I don’t know. Maybe that’s what went wrong with their experiment. When his wife was killed he cracked. He cared. He cared about his pain and his loss and he turned it against those he thought were responsible for it.”

 

Hutch out a hand on Starsky’s shoulder and realized that it was shaking. He looked at Starsky’s face and saw a tear running down his cheek. “You’ve been there, Starsky, you tell me.”

“I hope you never have to find out, buddy. I hope you never have to find out.”

 

It wasn’t until a few years later, when Hutch sat at his kitchen table staring at the body of his ex-wife lying on the floor that he remembered Starsky’s words.

_I hope you never have to find out…._

 


End file.
